Sunday, 12 March 2017

Yes again MEGAKITSCH or PLUMBING the SHALLOWS

Went last night (whenever it was now, (last October?) to see/hear Paper Music at Coronet. Beautiful performance by two singers and pianist, rather classic semi-trash avant-gardist set up of the '70s with old vinyls on crummy portable gramophones, amplified spinning wheel, plucked piano strings - not the calm absorption of Tilbury playing Feldman, but a frenzied and hysterical excess of burglar alarm imitations, crooning and singing with eclectic piano scoring reminding one, overall, and from time to time of fragments of Zemlinsky and Eisler. The problem here is neither the performers nor Phillip Miller's interesting scores but the grand master of the moment in what I will, vulgarly, call the 'Visual Arts', William Kentridge. He no longer makes any work that does not have as its reference, its absolute presence and its sole indicated subject, anything other than